1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a service platform, in particular to a platform for the provision of voice services which use speech technology. Typically such services will be interactive services, such as home banking, but the invention also finds application with non-interactive services.
2. Related Art
There is increasing pressure on the telecommunications industry to provide enhanced telephone services, to adapt more quickly to changing demands, and to provide increased value for money. One of the areas of technology which is key to achieving these goals is "speech technology", that is the technology of speech recognition, speaker recognition, speaker verification, speech synthesis, text-to-speech conversion, speech compression, etc. This technology can be used to provide improved customer service, replacing or assisting human operators, and or providing completely new services to customers. Typically, the various aspects of this technology are provided separately, often by different items of equipment. For some applications the equipment to provide the speech recognition, etc., will be associated with a main exchange in a telephone network (PSTN), while other applications equipment will be provided in, or in association with, customer's premises. Particularly for network-based equipment, there exists a need for equipment which can handle many calls simultaneously, preferably with the ability to provide multiple services simultaneously.
To some extent, this need has been met by equipment which provides interactive voice services and in which processors, typically digital signal processors (DSP)s are programmed to provide a particular service, the recognition or synthesis algorithms necessary for the provision of the particular service also being stored on or in close association with the programmed DSP. Such known apparatus is typically dedicated to the provision of one service, with the DSP or DSPs needed to provide the service being allocated as a whole to each incoming call as and when it is answered. This dedicated arrangement is simple and convenient, but it does mean that if any part of the service offering is very processor hungry, for example using a complex, speaker-independent recognition algorithm with a large vocabulary, the level of processor provisioning required to run that part of the service needs to be provided throughout the entire length of each call to that service, and this is clearly inefficient. While this inefficiency is supportable in small systems, systems which need to handle many calls are handicapped by the need to over provide processing resource. It would be desirable, therefore, if some means could be found to provide processing resource on an "as-needed" basis, while at the same time providing a reliable, quick and user-friendly service platform.